Saturday, December 01, 2012

Quick links

More of what caught my attention recently:

Android now has 72.4% of the mobile market, up from 52.5% a year ago ([1])

Google's new Nexus 4 smartphone is in high demand and for good reason: "The idea that a Nexus quad-core smartphone is hitting the market ... [at] $300 is simply stunning. Even more so is that it's available without any contract or carrier locks, which means you can use it virtually anywhere in the world. .. The price of freedom has never been more reasonable." ([1][2][3])

Google and Amazon aim to destroy Apple's high margin business model, selling hardware at cost and making money off content instead ([1])

"The ground is shifting beneath ... tech titans because of a major force: the rise of mobile devices" ([1])

Mobile/tablets are being used for about 16% of online sales, but sales from referrals out of Twitter and Facebook are near 0% ([1])

Google expects that 50% of traffic to Google.com will come from mobile in 2013. I wonder what that implies for Google, since it almost certainly does not mean 50% of revenue comes from mobile in 2013. ([1])

Google's latest Chromebook laptop and Nexus 7 tablet are both in high demand, and Google is "massively ramping production". Meanwhile, Microsoft is cutting production of its Surface hybrid tablet because of low demand. ([1][2][3])

Tablets mostly are used in the evening and for games and entertainment ([1][2][3])

"Giving users the choice to view (or not view) may actually increase this advertising effectiveness" ([1])

Experimental data is poised to kill off a big chunk of the last three decades of work in theoretical physics ([1])

Good overview of current state of autonomous flying robots. Lots of breakthroughs recently. ([1])

"It's actually more natural for humans to think logarithmically than linearly" ([1])

If you don't need the actual location right away, it's three orders of magnitude cheaper (in energy use) to collect raw GPS data and process it later (in the cloud) than it is to process it immediately on the mobile device ([1])

Startups would love to get their hands on Google Fiber (especially the upload speeds) but can't. Cities should be thinking about encouraging Google Fiber (or similar) as a way to encourage startups. ([1])

"Only a handful of startups that are big successes. What happens along the way that causes such failure? It's like there's a tunnel full of monsters that kill them along the way. I'm going to tell you what these monsters are so you know to avoid them." ([1])

"By far the most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one has" ([1])